Community cookbook for the 21st century

Jennifer Day, Special to the Tribune

Several years ago, as Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs waded through more than 150 years of recipes for Hesser's "Essential New York Times Cookbook," they began to develop a concept for an online food community. It started with the recognition that the best recipes come from home cooks. And given the explosion of interest in food in the last decade, more people than ever were knowledgeable cooks.

The Web already was teeming with food blogs and crowdsourced recipe sites. But the problem was an overabundance of information: Sure, it's great to be able to find 700 eggplant Parmesan recipes on a single site, but how do you know which one to cook? And even if readers' reviews are available, how do you know whose taste to trust? Without some sort of filter, Hesser says, the content isn't very useful.

So Hesser and Stubbs set out to build Food52.com, an online community that would bring together well-informed foodies while offering a layer of editorial guidance. To entice people to get involved, Food52 offered weekly recipe contests. And now, about two years after the website's launch, "The Food52 Cookbook" (William Morrow, $35) has been released, a crowdsourced cookbook edited by Hesser and Stubbs that documents 140 recipes from home cooks.

"Our suspicion was that there are so many people who know a ton about food and love to cook, but don't necessarily have a voice online," Stubbs said. "We wanted to provide a platform for them to get together and share their knowledge."

The result is not so different from an old-school community cookbook — the spiral-bound sort put together by churches and junior leagues. The difference is this community comprises curious and creative cooks: They know when to add a splash of Pernod to lamb shanks, and they're not daunted by cooking octopus.

The recipes from the cookbook stemmed from competitions hosted by Food52. Each week, a new theme is announced, and readers submit recipes of their own creation. Editors at Food52 then sift through the recipes to pick two finalists, which are posted on the site. Food52 followers vote between the two finalists to determine the winner.

About seven months into the project, the editors of Food52 discovered that they had unwittingly selected two sisters from Austin, Texas, as finalists in the "Your Best Movie Snack" contest. Arielle Arizpe and Helen Allen — who go by arielleclementine and Helenthenanny in the Food52 community — were going head-to-head in a fried-olive-versus-stuffed-pepper battle.

Arizpe eventually won with her olive all'Ascolana recipe — deep-fried, "crunchy, little flavor bombs," as "The Food52 Cookbook" says, stuffed with rosemary-and-dried-chili-scented goat cheese. However, Allen's devils on hatchback recipe, which wraps cream cheese-stuffed Hatch chili peppers in bacon and drizzles them with honey, has been viewed more than 20,000 times on Food52.

Arizpe says she always has loved to cook — she started cooking her family's Thanksgiving dinner at age 13 — but that she had never tried to write her own recipes until she got involved on Food52. She has since started a food blog and continues to be active on Food52.

"It was really liberating and empowering to know that you don't always have to follow recipes in a cookbook," says Arizpe.

Allen, on the other hand, rarely follows recipes, so she says Food52 has forced her to be more detail-oriented — which she thinks has improved her cooking. Another benefit of joining Food52, Allen says, is that the two sisters have made friends through the website with other local cooks, and about once a month they cook together.

1. Mix the cheese, mustard seed, rosemary, pepper flakes and garlic together in a small bowl. Stuff the olives with the mixture, using your fingers or a piping bag. Refrigerate to let the cheese firm up, 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan to 375 degrees. Put the flour on one plate, the egg on another and mix the bread crumbs and 1/3 cup Parmesan on a third.

3. Working in batches, roll the olives in the flour, then in the egg, then in the bread crumbs; carefully lower them into the oil. Fry until golden brown, about 30 seconds per side. Transfer to a plate lined with paper towels. Shower with Parmesan and lemon zest; spritz with lemon.